Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (39 page)

ROGER MIRET:
Back in the days when we did the
United Blood
EP [in 1983], everyone was doing acid and angel dust. But we didn’t have any money, so we used to rob drug dealers. Me and [drummer Raymond] Raybeez [Barbieri] had big meat hooks and one of us had a gun. We’d sneak up and rob these machine gun toting dealers because those guys had the best angel dust. When you put a meat hook to somebody’s throat, they forget they’re holding a machine gun. We’d play shows and these same drug dealers would be dancing to the band after we robbed them because they liked the music and they didn’t know it was us.

JOHN JOSEPH:
The vibe in Tompkins Square park, [where we hung out, was one of] drugs and guns. It became a daily occurrence to find people either overdosed or murdered, but everyone took it in stride—just life in the city, y’know? I mean, I was
raised
on the streets when it was really fucking dangerous. The band was an outlet to express what I was feeling from being on the streets, and it was cool because we had this spiritual message about looking for meaning in life. But we were unlike bands who delivered their message with a flower. Cro-Mags delivered it with a baseball bat.

HARLEY FLANAGAN:
We used to surf on the hoods of cars, tripping our faces off. We used to get in fights all the time. But honestly, John was just a little bit less fucked up than everybody else. John just didn’t get in fights. He’s good at putting on a big show. Like, “What? Yo! I’ll fuck you up.” He does that ghetto-ass bullshit—talks a lot of shit and everyone panics and nobody wants to be the one to step up. But I don’t remember him being in more than a couple fights in the thirty years I’ve known him. I remember my high score though. I put nineteen motherfuckers in the ICU in one night. I was a fuckin’ hooligan. But that all started because I was a target in my neighborhood. Once I started fighting back I got respect.

JOHN JOSEPH:
One time me and Harley went to see the Bad Brains at L’Amour and all these metal dudes were there, and one of them punched Harley. Me and Harley fucking fought eight of these dudes and fucked them up. See, the metal dudes didn’t know how to get down in the pit. They didn’t understand moshing was like an art form. You had people creepy-crawling, coming within six inches of each other but never smashing into each other. The metal motherfuckers didn’t understand that, and they’d just be like, “Oh shit, he bumped into me, let me run up and punch him in the back of the head,” and next thing you know they’d get the shit beat out of them. Then the next week they’d show up with a fucking shaved head.

HARLEY FLANAGAN:
On Avenue A [in New York City], there was a private club called A7, where we all hung out and played. Imagine a small room full of insane people who have angel dust, bags of glue, and 40-ounce bottles of alcohol and you’ll see a little bit of what it was like. I was always drinkin’ there because having a 40-ounce bottle in your hand meant that not only did you have a buzz on, but you were armed. If anybody fucking said shit, you could smack them in the head with the bottle.

ROGER MIRET:
One day, Raybeez was tripping on angel dust and he tried to commit suicide by the East River. He had a gun and he pulled it out and started yelling that he was gonna kill himself. All of us being on angel dust didn’t help diffuse the situation, but I managed to get the gun away from him. We had to kick him out of the band after that because he was too unstable. But fuck, man. We used to get so high on angel dust and sometimes we’d get in our old bass player, Rob Kabula’s, car and see how many red lights we could get through before we hit another car. Then, after the accident, we’d take off. The Lower East Side was our city, our town. Whatever we did went.

MIKE DEAN (Corrosion of Conformity):
Agnostic Front were very good and very tight, but there was always an aura of violence. It gets good marks on the authenticity level. They’re not pretending to be anything they weren’t. But if I’m thinking, “Do I want my sixteen-year-old going out and running with these dudes, basically marauding and getting into fights and fucking people up?” Hell no, I wouldn’t. That’s some real street shit and not something I want to be involved in.

ROGER MIRET:
We didn’t wise up for a long time. Our music was political, but we were doing acid the whole first tour and then we’d go into a military recruiting center and try to join: Army, Navy, whatever. We never got called on it. I think the recruiting people thought it was entertaining. When we were on the road, we’d just pull over randomly and shoot guns at the farm animals on the highways or shoot at a train as it went by. One time going into New Jersey I had a bunch of ammunition in my bag, and cops pulled us over and decided to search the whole band and fortunately, they searched through every bag but mine.

One of the biggest internal schisms within the crossover scene took place between Cro-Mags bassist and founder Harley Flanagan and vocalist John Joseph. Both insist they started as friends. But a gulf erupted when Joseph left the band after they were signed and recorded 1986’s legendary
The Age of Quarrel
, an album that brimmed with the speed of Motörhead and the attitude of the Sex Pistols. Unable to coexist, Joseph and Flanagan bounced in and out between lengthy hiatuses. Then, in 2003, Joseph re-formed the group without Flanagan, who was furious at Joseph both for using the name Cro-Mags and for making disparaging comments about him in his 2007 book,
The Evolution of a Cro-Magnon
. Ironically, Joseph and Flanagan once both adopted the ideals in the
Bhagavad Gita
in a quest for inner peace, and the Cro-Mags are widely regarded as the first major Krishna-core band. The Krishna tag made for a great marketing hook, but it wasn’t one the Cro-Mags fully embraced. Even as they preached enlightenment, they smoked bales of weed and continued to bust heads.

JOHN JOSEPH:
I once got beat up by six guys. I had beaten up one of them, and then they came back in Cadillacs with baseball bats and took me out. To be honest, I got my ass kicked lots. I called a gigantic black guy the N-word one time and he beat me so bad I had a black eye for two weeks. But eventually, I matured and grew spiritually because I wanted to be a better person.

HARLEY FLANAGAN:
John came on all spiritual, but there were times when I’d be fucking up people, and he’d be going through their pockets saying, “Give up your shit or my man’s gonna fuck you up.” When John first got into the Krishna consciousness, people on the scene totally made fun of him. One time at one of our illegal basement crash pads, Apt. X on Norfolk Street, everybody was high on angel dust and they burned all his books and pamphlets and he threw a fit and threatened to kick everyone’s ass. And everyone’s giggling. But me and some of our roadies wound up kicking the piss out of a few people and putting them really close to death.

JOHN JOSEPH:
Shit got out of hand when Harley got into this whole skinhead gay-bashing thing because some gay dudes took out a contract to get him fucked up. I got in a fight with those guys, but then we became friends, so I was able to squash that whole thing. Then I was like, “Yo, Harley, concentrate on the music, that’s what your thing in life is. It’s not about running around like an idiot all the time and kicking people’s asses.”

HARLEY FLANAGAN:
Man, John tries to demonize me by blowing up some ill, dumb shit, when the fact is Allen Ginsberg was one of my mom’s best friends and I grew up around Allen. I knew plenty of homos growing up. I didn’t beat
them
up. I got in way more fights with the local Puerto Ricans, drunk yuppies, and bridge-and-tunnel motherfuckers. I’m not homophobic, and I could fuckin’ play you tapes of the Cro-Mags playing at CBGB where John was on a complete anti-homo rant between every song. I’ve had singers and managers who were gay, and I’ve had friends that were gay. It’s not something I’m really concerned about. The thing is, when I was a kid on the streets a lot of the people that were out at that hour were freaks and pervs. You’re fifteen and you got motherfuckers trying to take advantage of you sexually. They’d offer you drugs, get you to their house, feed you, hook you up. So what are you going to do? You’re gonna rob the motherfucker. Okay, that ain’t right or politically correct, but is that less correct than some pedophile trying to pick up some homeless kid who ain’t got nowhere else to be?

The schism between Joseph and Flanagan continues to this day. During a celebration of the legendary club CBGB in summer 2012, Joseph was arrested after a violent conflict.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
(July 7, 2012): A former member of the Cro-Mags slashed two current members of the band as they were set to take the stage in Manhattan, police sources said. The show at Webster Hall, part of the CBGB Festival, was canceled and two members of the band were taken to Bellevue Hospital. One was treated for a bite mark and a cut to the face and the other for cuts to his arm and stomach, the sources said. The attacker was also taken to Bellevue Hospital to be treated for a broken leg, according to police sources. Harley Flanagan, a founding member of the New York band who has a history of strained relations with newer members, is believed to be the attacker.

HARLEY FLANAGAN:
I, being the sentimental fool that I am, thought that if I actually saw John face to face and got to speak to him that maybe it would rekindle some of that friendship that we had. [I was invited backstage to speak to John, but instead of being greeted warmly, I was attacked.] I was getting the shit beat out of me; it was like an old-fashioned biker beat down. So what I did was defend my life.

JOHN JOSEPH:
Harley’s been watching too many sci-fi movies. First of all, Harley was
not
invited to the show. He was given a CBGBs laminate to attend another event, then used it to sneak into the show. He just wanted to come on the stage during the show and do something to gain press—well, he got his press, all right. We were onstage about to go on; he was asked to come into the dressing room. When Harley was grabbed to be searched for weapons, the fight ensued. He pulled a knife and began stabbing people. When the security finally arrived, he wouldn’t drop the knife and they banged him up.

Californian crossover may not have been as blatantly violent as the East Coast scene, but the more urban bands came of age in an era of gun-toting gangs like the Crips and Bloods. In Venice, California, crossover pioneers Suicidal Tendencies became the go-to group for metal-loving gangsters of all stripes. While the band members claim they weren’t in a gang, they sure looked the part—and they didn’t discourage violence at their shows. There was, however, more to Suicidal Tendencies than blue bandanas, flipped-up baseball caps, and an open invitation to mayhem. Their self-titled 1983 album is a smarmy, sarcastic hardcore classic, featuring the single “Institutionalized,” which was included in the 1984 cult film
Repo Man
. That same year, the band boosted its metal cred with the addition of guitar shredder Rocky George, who remained with the band for eleven years and whose riffing style was often imitated. As lynchpins of LA crossover, Suicidal was watched closely by the police and feared by other, less well-armed bands.

MIKE MUIR (Suicidal Tendencies):
We’ve always been the outsiders. There are certain people that
try
to be outsiders. We never did. We just
were
outside. We realized that, and everywhere we went there were people watching us warily. Even when we were in a room, the people there were afraid we were going to trash the place. You could see the way they were talking, and then when we came in they talked differently.

MIKE CLARK:
From the start, the status quo were scared to death by our lyrical content. And we had a certain style of dress where we come from, which is Venice Beach, California. All the skateboarders, surfers—we call ’em
eses
or
vatos
—the Mexican gangsters—we all dressed the same. We wore khakis or blue jeans, Pendleton button down shirts and bandanas, and these shoes called Rhinos. We were getting arrested, literally, a few times a week, just because of the way we looked.

MIKE MUIR:
All these people told us we needed the proper “etiquette” for the massive punk rock goal of being an individual. I always loved that shit—individuality. Their definition of individuality was looking like
they
do, having the same haircut, thinking the same way, and then, you become an individual. I always thought that was a little strange. I’m not too smart, but somehow that concept went right over my head.

KATON W. DE PENA:
Suicidal Tendencies had their own record label and they wanted to sign us. The only reason we didn’t sign with them was we didn’t like the gang element of their music. I love Mike Muir, and Rocky George is one of the most underrated guitar players. We got along with those guys beautifully, but Hirax is all about bringing people together, not dividing them. Suicidal had such a gang mentality following their music that it just wasn’t the right fit.

The two biggest crossover bands outside of New York and Los Angeles were Dirty Rotten Imbeciles (D.R.I.), which formed in Houston, Texas, before moving to San Francisco, and Corrosion of Conformity (C.O.C.), which hailed from North Carolina and released three slabs of fierce, powerful crossover before transforming into a Southern rock–influenced doom metal band. Since they came from scenes far removed from the major crossover action, both adopted a strong DIY mentality. The major problem with doing it yourself, as they discovered, is that you quickly run out of money, gasoline, and food.